This popped up in my rss reader and caught my eye because I'm a tense and aspect geek.

Quite apart from the cricket scandal, do the language folks here have any comments based on their knowledge of Urdu? Or perhaps more interestingly, a question posed by one of the commenters: does whether a time (for example, future) is expressed by inflection or with auxiliaries in some way whether we say a lang actually has that tense? Personally I think it depends on the sphere in which the conversation is taking place: my Teach Yourself Tagalog book and cds talk about tenses, but all the 'academic' linguistic literature talks about aspects instead (referring to the same morphoogy).

Normally I just skim Language Log because I don't like the writing style - it comes across to me as somewhat preachy and arrogant. The subject of this piece, however, induced me to click it through to my browser. I'm interested in what others think

I'm fine with treating the English "will" construction as a future tense, because my conception of tenses (gleaned, to be honest, from popular language-learning materials) includes both simple and compound tenses. But a lot of authorities disagree and say that English doesn't have a future tense. In any case, this particular point is irrelevant to the Urdu thing that was referenced in the LL post, because Urdu definitely has a simple inflected future tense.

Normally I just skim Language Log because I don't like the writing style - it comes across to me as somewhat preachy and arrogant.

I read most of the posts on LL, except the really long ones with tons of theory and data.

And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

To the extent that future is actually a tense, I see absolutely no reason to say that English doesn't have one. I mean, what else is the will-construction supposed to be? A definition of tense as "tense expressed by a bound morpheme" doesn't look particularly interesting to me.

I think a good way to demonstrate English's lack of a true future tense is to compare it to Japanese.In Japanese (I hear Chinese is similar), the most common way to express a future action is to state the time when the action will happen.あした、僕は宿題をします。Literally: Tomorrow, I homework do. (Tomorrow, I do homework/Tomorrow, I will do homework)I translated that with and without "will" because it is optional in English and only slightly changes the meaning. In either case "do" is inarguably conjugated as present. And in the second case "will" is inarguably a modal verb modifying "do".This form is uncommon in English, but it exists. Another clearly non-future future is "I'm going to do homework."

My point is that it's by far not been established that there is one meaning that the synthetic futures have which the English will-construction lacks. In order to do this, one has to give some alternative semantics for will that produces this future-like meaning and in addition give an argument why the synthetic forms shouldn't have it. We're talking about a pretty radically different conceptualization of things here...

Makri wrote:My point is that it's by far not been established that there is one meaning that the synthetic futures have which the English will-construction lacks. In order to do this, one has to give some alternative semantics for will that produces this future-like meaning and in addition give an argument why the synthetic forms shouldn't have it.

I don't see why we need to do that in order to not consider will a tense. Would you consider gonna a tense as well?

I'm not sure about that. I don't know enough about the details of its meaning. But it does seem rather more likely than will to have meaning components that you don't find with uncontentious synthetic future forms. (Also, I'm not even sure that future is a tense at all; my claim was only that whatever future is, "will" isn't different from synthetic futures unless you give an argument for it.)

The reason I asked is because gonna is only used when talking about the future, but will can be used when talking about times other than the future. So it seems to me that in your analysis, gonna is more of a future tense than will.